languagehat.com

I normally look askance at made-up words, but Anand Giridharadas has come up with a good and useful one in his essay for The.Ink which I hope catches on (even as I know it won’t):

My name is Anand. It means happiness, bliss, contentment. If you’re interested in experiencing these feelings, may I suggest a name other than Anand when coming of age in the United States of America.

The other day, when Senator David Perdue, Republican of Georgia, referred to his colleague of many years as “Kamala-mala-mala, I don’t know, whatever!”, I immediately recognized him. All my life, perhaps like you, I have run up against the unwillingness and inability of many Americans to say my name correctly.[…]

The obvious word for what Perdue did is “mispronunciation.” But I would like to correct that. The proper term is “dispronunciation.” Consider that misinformation is information that merely happens to be false, whereas disinformation is false information purposely spread. Similarly, mispronunciation is people trying too feebly and in vain to say our names — and dispronunciation is people saying our names incorrectly on purpose, as if to remind us whose country this really is.[…]

In my case, I’m not even talking about the pronunciation of my last name here. Look, I would love to live in a society where both names were said right by most people. But I recognize that my last name is difficult. I have heard it mispronounced in India, where it comes from. For the purposes of this discussion, I want to share my bafflement and frustration with the insurmountable difficulty of getting people in the United States of America to say “Anand.”

It’s pronounced “AH-nund.” […] AH + nunned. Faster now — Anand. […] And what I just did is far easier to do out loud […] Yet it has been a lifelong battle to get those five letters, those two syllables, said right. There is “ANNE-ind” and “ah-NAAND” and “AY-nanned.” And those are just the ones I remember. My expectation has never been that anyone should know how to say it before being properly taught. I’m just mystified why it’s so hard after hearing it.

He has some distressing anecdotes (and a great comeback to a public-radio host who kept saying it wrong: “Y’all have no problem saying Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky”). I presume we’re all in agreement that people should make a little more effort, but as I say, I like his term for the malicious version. Try harder, mispronouncers, and knock it off, dispronouncers!

I recently ran across the Wikipedia article Qurabiya:

Qurabiya (also ghraybe, ghorayeba, and numerous other spellings and pronunciations) is a shortbread-type biscuit, usually made with ground almonds. Versions are found in most countries of the former Ottoman Empire, with various different forms and recipes. […]

There is some debate about the origin of the words. Some give no other origin for the Turkish word kurabiye than Turkish, while others have given Arabic or Persian. Among others, linguist Sevan Nişanyan has given an Arabic origin, in his 2009 book of Turkish etymology, from ġurayb or ğarîb (exotic). However, as of 2019, Nişanyan’s online dictionary now gives the earliest known recorded use in Turkish as the late 17th century, with an origin from the Persian gulābiya, a cookie made with rose water, from gulāb, related to flowers. He notes that the Syrian Arabic words ġurābiye/ġuraybiye likely derive from the Turkish.

A typical Wikipedia etymological mishmosh; can anybody say what’s most plausible? (Xerîb?)

Also, courtesy of Trevor Joyce, a brief YouTube clip in which Werner Herzog regrets having been forced at gunpoint to speak French.

I was trying to find some biographical information on the editor John Benson when I ran across this 2012 interview with Casey Burchby, from which I quote the opening paragraph:

Squa Tront is dedicated to the relatively brief but enormously influential output of EC Comics. Through interviews, rare sketches and artwork, corporate ephemera, and panel discussions, Squa Tront (which takes its name from two words often uttered by aliens in EC’s comics) pays tribute to the writers and artists behind titles like Tales from the Crypt, Weird Science, Frontline Combat, and Mad. Although Squa Tront has its roots in EC fandom, its meticulous editorial focus has long since moved the magazine much closer to scholarship. May saw the release of its 13th issue in 45 years.

That is just the kind of cultural detritus I love; I mentioned the phrase a few years ago in this fantabulous post, but I thought I’d give it its own feature, since it’s so great. Also, if anyone knows anything about this John Benson (as opposed to the many other John Bensons — not one but two described as “calligrapher and stonecarver”!), do speak up.

This is another long-shot question, but I figure it’s worth a try. Over at Wordorigins, Theopolis asks about the word flist, which occurs twice on p. 106 of the Rev. T. P. Crawford’s “A System of Phonetic Symbols for Writing the Dialects of China” (Chinese Recorder XIX:3 [March 1888]). Here’s the passage:

3. The tone signs are as follows:—Ping shing, a plain character; Shang shing, a hook or flist to the right. K’u shing, a hook or flist to the left; Yi shing, a dot in the centre.

You can see the tone signs themselves on p. 108. Now, there is a Scots word flist ‘explosion; sudden outburst of rage; brag, boast, fib; blow, smack,’ but that doesn’t seem like it could be relevant here. Naturally one suspects a typo, but of what? “Fist” is a typographical sign, but surely not here. Any ideas?

This is pretty silly, but hey, we can all use a chuckle these days — Overzealous profanity filter bans paleontologists from talking about bones:

Participants in a virtual paleontology session found themselves caught between a rock and a hard place last week, when a profanity filter prevented them from using certain words – such as bone, pubic, stream and, er, beaver – during an online conference.

The US-based Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) held its annual meeting virtually this year due to the pandemic, but soon found its audience stifled when they tried to use particular words. Convey Services, which was was handling the conference, used a “naughty-word filter,” for the conference, outlawing a pre-selected list of words.

“Words like ‘bone’, ‘pubic’, and ‘stream’ are frankly ridiculous to ban in a field where we regularly find pubic bones in streams,” said Brigid Christison, a master’s student in biology attending the event, in an interview with Vice.

You’ll be pleased to know all ended well:

“After getting a good belly laugh out of the way on the first day and some creative wording (my personal favorite was Heck Creek for Hell Creek), some of us reached out to the business office, and they’ve been un-banning words as we stumble across them,” an SVP member explained to Reddit users.

Reminds me with my struggles with spammers back in the day (I’d ban the string “cialis” only to discover no one could talk about socialism). Thanks, Lars!

This is one of those questions about an incredibly trivial issue that probably bothers no one but me and that may be unanswerable, but I’ve had luck getting obscure questions solved here before, so here goes. In Mandelstam’s Путешествие в Армению (Journey to Armenia; see yesterday’s post) he gets onto the topic of naturalists, and says:

Россия в изображении замечательного натуралиста Палласа: бабы гонят краску мариону из квасцов с березовыми листьями, липовая кора сама сдирается на лыки, заплетается в лапти и лукошки.

Russia in the imagination of the remarkable naturalist Pallas: peasant women distill the dye “mariona” from a mixture of birch leaves and alum; the bark of the linden tree peels itself off to become bast, and it is woven into sandals and baskets.

What the heck is this “mariona”? Google finds “ТКАНЬ: мариона, футер с лайкрой 2-х нитка” (FABRIC: mariona, 2-strand lycra futer [‘knitted cotton with polyester’ — anybody know where that word is from?]), and Google Books finds in the Travaux de l’Institut d’ethnographie N.N. Mikloukho-Maklaï (either 1947 or 1963) “Он назвал несколько растений, применявшихся для крашения шерстяных тканей «мариона»” (He named several plants used for dyeing woolen “mariona” fabrics [I don’t know who “he” is — Pallas maybe?]), so it’s a thing, but it sure is scantily documented, and it’s not even clear whether it’s a dye or a fabric. Any information gratefully received.

I’m rereading Mandelstam’s 1933 Путешествие в Армению (Journey to Armenia) in preparation for reading Andrei Bitov’s 1969 Уроки Армении (Lessons of Armenia), and I keep the Clarence Brown translation handy in case of emergency (Mandelstam’s prose is not easy reading). Just now I got to the fourth section, Сухум (Sukhumi), which opens with a passage on the local language:

В начале апреля я приехал в Сухум — город траура, табака и душистых растительных масел. Отсюда следует начинать изучение азбуки Кавказа — здесь каждое слово начинается на “а”. Язык абхазцев мощен и полногласен, но изобилует верхне- и нижнегортанными слитными звуками, затрудняющими произношение; можно сказать, что он вырывается из гортани, заросшей волосами.

Боюсь, еще не родился добрый медведь Балу, который обучит меня, как мальчика Маугли из джунгей Киплинга, прекрасному языку “апсны” — хотя в отдаленном будущем академии для изучения группы кавказских языков рисуются мне разбросанными по всему земному шару.

My translation:

At the start of April I arrived in Sukhumi, a city of mourning, tobacco, and fragrant vegetable oils. This is where one should begin the study of the alphabets of the Caucasus — every word here begins with “a.” The language of the Abkhazians is mighty and full-voweled, but it abounds in fused sounds of the upper and lower larynx, making pronunciation more difficult; you could say that it is ripped out of a larynx covered with hairs.

I’m afraid the kindly bear Baloo has not yet been born who would teach me, like the boy Mowgli from Kipling’s jungle, the lovely language of “Apsny” [Abkhaz Аԥсны ‘Abkhazia’] — although in the distant future I foresee academies for the study of the Caucasian languages scattered over the entire globe.

When I looked at Brown’s translation, I discovered that the poor guy, not knowing what to make of “апсны,” had identified it with апчхи [apchkhi], the Russian conventional representation of sneezing, and translated the phrase as “the splendid language of ‘ahchoo.’” I, an aficionado of languages and endonyms, knew immediately what апсны was, but you have to pity Brown in the mid-1960s with no knowledge of Abkhaz and no search engines — how was he to know what the devil it meant?

I recently made another swerve back to the late nineteenth century and read Tolstoy’s Крейцерова соната (The Kreutzer Sonata); I wasn’t expecting great things from it, but it was very famous and I thought “How bad can late Tolstoy fiction be?” It came between The Death of Ivan Ilich and Hadji-Murat, after all. Turns out the answer is “very bad indeed.” It’s basically a long rant by the wife-killer Pozdnyshev, going on and on about how so-called love is just lust and it’s evil and marriage is just prostitution by another name (a respectable feminist position, of course, which has led some feminists to praise the story) and God wants us all to be chaste and blah blah blah. He’s a nineteenth-century Russian Howard Beale. Aside from the tediousness of it all, it’s just sad to see the flexible, lively style of Tolstoy’s great novels fall so low, his carefully calculated repetitions turn into a brutal, thudding, deadening drumbeat that makes you want to skip as badly as the Second Appendix. I can see why its message was newsworthy, but I don’t understand how anyone could think it was a good story.

Fortunately, I followed it up with a work I had no expectations of (and don’t remember having heard of), Chekhov’s Моя жизнь (My Life). It’s one of his longest stories, almost a hundred pages in my edition (the 1956 Complete Works), but it’s nowhere near as famous as short stories like “The Lady with the Little Dog.” I can understand why — it’s hard to summarize, and you don’t end it with that Maupassantesque feeling of narrative satisfaction — but I think it’s one of his best, and unlike anything else I’ve read of his. It’s narrated by Misail Poloznev, a twentysomething scapegrace who refuses to do the kind of high-class work his architect father expects of him (the story opens with him getting fired from yet another job) and yearns to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, to be one with the common people of Russia. But he’s not one of those Turgenev or Dostoevsky characters, the young ideologues who make fools of themselves trying to “go to the people” — his resistance is not political, it’s a gut reaction to the hypocrisy, cruelty, and ugliness he sees all around him in the bourgeois society he grew up in (it’s set in a provincial city much like Chekhov’s hometown of Taganrog). He finally cuts his ties with polite society, goes to work as a laborer for a house-painter and contractor, marries a woman who shares his views, and for a while feels deep satisfaction.
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Anne-Wil Harzing’s 2017 white paper “The mystery of the phantom reference” describes an annoying phenomenon:

Through my work with Publish or Perish I get in touch with many academics who are doing bibliometric work, oftentimes as a “research hobby”. In one of these exchanges, Pieter Kroonenberg, a Dutch emeritus professor in Statistics, told me about an interesting puzzle he had come across. When looking at the author guidelines for an Elsevier journal that he intended to submit to he noticed the following reference:

•   Van der Geer, J., Hanraads, J.A.J., Lupton, R.A., 2000. The art of writing a scientific article. J Sci. Commun. 163 (2) 51-59. [The journal name can also be found with its full title Journal of Science Communications]

He was intrigued to see that one of his former colleagues Prof. John van de Geer had a “hidden side”, publishing about the art of academic writing in addition to his work on experimental psychology and multivariate analysis. But, wait a minute…, this reference referred to Van der Geer instead of Van de Geer. Still…, the paper looked interesting so he ventured to look it up. However, despite strenuous efforts he was unable to find it. An (Italian) journal with a similar name did exist, but its full name was Journal of Science Communication rather than Communications and it had only started in 2002. Looking at the original reference again, it did strike him as a little odd for a journal to have published 163 volumes in a discipline that normally equates volumes to years. Moreover, the second author seemed to have only ever published this particular article, which obviously is rather strange for someone writing about the art of writing a scientific article.

To cut a long story short, the article appeared to be completely made up and did not in fact exist. It was a “phantom reference” that had been created merely to illustrate Elsevier’s desired reference format. Even so, Pieter found that in the Web of Science there were nearly 400 articles citing this non-existing reference and many more citing articles appeared in the more comprehensive Google Scholar. The fact that academics don’t always take the necessary care in their referencing behaviour is something that is not unfamiliar to me. Early on in my career, I even wrote an article about this: Are referencing errors undermining our scholarship and credibility? But even so, how could authors cite a publication that didn’t in fact exist?

I’ll let you read the details at the link; here’s Harzing’s conclusion:
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I enjoyed Charlie Smith’s “On Translating the chinari” (the чинари, stress on the final syllable, were a group of nonconformist writers whose best-known members were Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky) for its own sake, but what drove me to post was his link to Vladimir Nabokov’s “The Art of Translation” (New Republic, August 4, 1941), which includes the following amusing demolition of incompetence and stupidity:

The howlers included in the first category [“obvious errors due to ignorance or misguided knowledge”] may be in their turn divided into two classes. Insufficient acquaintance with the foreign language involved may transform a commonplace expression into some remarkable statement that the real author never intended to make. “Bien être general” becomes the manly assertion that “it is good to be a general”; to which gallant general a French translator of “Hamlet” has been known to pass the caviar. Likewise, in a German edition of Chekhov, a certain teacher, as soon as he enters the classroom, is made to become engrossed in “his newspaper,” which prompted a pompous reviewer to comment on the sad condition of public instruction in pre-Soviet Russia. But the real Chekhov was simply referring to the classroom “journal” which a teacher would open to check lessons, marks and absentees. And inversely, innocent words in an English novel such as “first night” and “public house” have become in a Russian translation “nuptial night” and “a brothel.” These simple examples suffice. They are ridiculous and jarring, but they contain no pernicious purpose; and more often than not the garbled sentence still makes some sense in the original context.

The other class of blunders in the first category includes a more sophisticated kind of mistake, one which is caused by an attack of linguistic Daltonism suddenly blinding the translator. Whether attracted by the far-fetched when the obvious was at hand (What does an Eskimo prefer to eat—ice cream or tallow? Ice cream), or whether unconsciously basing his rendering on some false meaning which repeated readings have imprinted on his mind, he manages to distort in an unexpected and sometimes quite brilliant way the most honest word or the tamest metaphor. I knew a very conscientious poet who in wrestling with the translation of a much tortured text rendered “is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” in such a manner as to convey an impression of pale moonlight. He did this by taking for granted that “sickle” referred to the form of the new moon. And a national sense of humor, set into motion by the likeness between the Russian words meaning “arc” and “onion,” led a German professor to translate “a bend of the shore” (in a Pushkin fairy tale) by “the Onion Sea.”

The second, and much more serious, sin of leaving out tricky passages is still excusable when the translator is baffled by them himself; but how contemptible is the smug person who, although quite understanding the sense, fears it might stump a dunce or debauch a dauphin! Instead of blissfully nestling in the arms of the great writer, he keeps worrying about the little reader playing in a corner with something dangerous or unclean. Perhaps the most charming example of Victorian modesty that has ever come my way was in an early English translation of “Anna Karenina.” Vronsky had asked Anna what was the matter with her. “I am beremenna” (the translator’s italics), replied Anna, making the foreign reader wonder what strange and awful Oriental disease that was; all because the translator thought that “I am pregnant” might shock some pure soul, and that a good idea would be to leave the Russian just as it stood.

The “Pushkin fairy tale” is Ruslan and Lyudmila, which begins У лукоморья дуб зеленый ‘By a cove a green oak,’ where лукоморья ‘cove’ includes the root of лука ‘bend (in road or river),’ Nabokov’s “arc,” which could be mistaken for лук ‘onion(s).’ I have to say that I no longer enjoy Nabokov’s mandarin, de-haut-en-bas style as I did when I was a pompous would-be-mandarin youth; it now seems to me an attempt to bully the reader into submission with a sneering assumption of omniscience, something that came natural to the scion of a fabulously rich aristocratic family. He knew a lot, but he didn’t know as much as he thought he did, and other people weren’t as stupid as he thought they were. Pull down thy vanity, as another great writer once said.